Beyond Misinformation: Early Nineteenth-Century Dubious Sources and the Historical Post-Truth
Chair(s): Frederick Reece (University of Washington)
In recent years, fake news and dubious source material have gained renewed prominence in musicology (Shaver-Gleason 2016, Weitz 2019, Fine 2023). But thus far much of this scholarship has inherited a methodological binarism present in earlier research (e.g. Stafford 1991) evoked by the term “fake.” For instance, across the last century, numerous large documentary projects (e.g. opera omnia), critical editions, biographies, and monographs, especially on late eighteenth and nineteenth-century music, were explicitly framed in terms of correcting myths, spurious attributions, and misinformation as remnants of the “amateur” work of the nineteenth century. And as research seeks truth, once any untruths were discovered, the idea seemed to be that they could thereafter be cast aside as irrelevant to history.
This panel argues that this story is not so simple. More in-depth examinations of particular false sources, methods, and reception histories complicate assumptions about how we relate to the past and why certain narratives persist despite a lack of evidence, multiple attempts at debunking, and/or a reliance on pseudoscientific thought. Indeed, a closer reading of musicological historiography points to a strain of post-truth—or at least the influence of emotions, personal beliefs, and cognitive dissonances hidden within supposedly purely factual scholarship—that has long been a part of, if not foundational to, the practice of musicology. The truth is that the historical investment in certain narratives creates complex legacies that continue to inform the interpretation of music history. This panel proposes a new conversation about how ambiguous and problematic pieces of evidence are valuable artifacts of both history and historiography that lend real insight, despite their tenuous relationship with the truth. Shaena Weitz examines how the nineteenth-century development of para-social celebrity relationships continues to affect how scholars interact with source material. Kristin Franseen considers the place of historically unreliable anecdotes in shaping the reception and popular perception of works that otherwise fell out of the operatic repertoire over the first half of the nineteenth century. Hester Bell Jordan reevaluates the role of pseudoscientific ideas in nineteenth-century musical discourse and will consider how such ideas survive in new forms today.
Presentations of the Symposium
The “Crimes” of Frédéric Kalkbrenner: Celebrity Fraud and Parasocial Relationships
Shaena B. Weitz
N/A
While the transformation toward what Lydia Goehr has called the Beethoven paradigm (1992) has been examined from a philosophical viewpoint, the material and discursive conditions that supported it remain much less understood. One prominent feature hidden in the underbelly of Beethoven’s idealization is the constructed existence of musical villains—the dangerous stars of yesteryear, vanquished by Beethoven's music-conceptual triumph. As villains, they are dastardly and evil; as enemies, they are simultaneously too socially powerful and too musically weak.
Central to these villain narratives are damaging stories that “unmask” the moral failures of the villains. For example, the pianist/composer Frédéric Kalkbrenner (1784–1849) was a former child prodigy with an impeccable pedigree and successful international career—someone widely hailed as a genius—but who was later ridiculed for faking an improvisation, and teaching his son to fake an improvisation. He was accused of duplicitous dealings with publishers and even espionage. These accusations of fraud are especially intriguing because they appear to be false themselves—stories of dubious origin aimed to discredit him.
More complex is that these fabricated stories remain attractive to our emotions today, circulating on classical blogs, YouTube comments, and in scholarship as well. The idea that we might have feelings about people we have never met—that we might love them or loathe them—is called a para-social relationship, or one-sided intimacy from afar that developed in the nineteenth century. This is a central but little-examined feature of Goehr’s “Beethoven paradigm.” I argue that the existence of fraud stories, even if they are fictitious, is emblematic of a wider shift to a default para-social relationship based on the “social crediting” (Franck 2020) of trust via what Felicity Nussbaum (2010) calls the “interiority effect.” Using Kalkbrenner fraud stories as an inverse reflection of a posture that has been normalized as a universal, this paper will analyze what drives the development of para-social relationships in the nineteenth century in dialogue with recent work on celebrity intimacy (van Krieken 2018, Rojek 2022), and will examine their effects on evidence, historical and modern emotions, and music practice today.
Reputation, Myth, and Fiction in the Nineteenth-Century Reception of Salieri’s _Axur, re d’Ormus_
Kristin Franseen
University of Western Ontario
Operatic reception histories tend to be closely linked to histories of performance. How can one speak of the reception of a work that many people have not seen performed? A closer look at the early nineteenth-century literary treatment of one of Antonio Salieri’s most successful works, Axur, re d’Ormus (1788), suggests a complicated network of interactions across critical commentary, competing biographical claims, and fictions. In this climate, even a work that was increasingly unheard on the stage could still continue to maintain a degree of recognizability and even accrue new meanings.
While prior scholarship has explored how Axur’s French progenitor Tarare remained relevant during times of increasing censorship and volatile politics (Betzwieser 1994, Rice 1998, Law 2017 and 2020), this presentation considers shifting references to Axur—sometimes including direct musical allusions—across nineteenth-century music criticism and biographical fiction. I argue that the mythmaking around Axur’s widely reported status as Joseph II’s famous opera and the longevity of Tarare in the Parisian repertoire combined and lingered in the popular imagination, with some commentators treating Axur and Tarare as essentially the same work. Through multiple retellings and reframings, anecdotal knowledge of the initial commercial and critical successes of Axur in Vienna could lead from it being put forth as potential model for Mozart’s late work (Arnold 1803) to being critiqued as a work unduly praised by previous audiences (Ayrton 1825) to being reimagined in fiction as evidence of Salieri’s supposed intrigues against Mozart (Mörike 1855). Importantly, this is not a single linear narrative from acclaim to neglect, as some early negative depictions of Salieri nonetheless still considered Axur and/or Tarare as worthy of special recognition despite their villainization of its composer (Pushkin 1830 and Nicolai 1835). These examples demonstrate the contested nature of Salieri’s canonical status throughout the decade following his death, at a time when multiple commentators sought to explain, condemn, or defend his rapidly changing reputation. I conclude with a brief reflection on the use of Axur to blend biography, myth, and fiction at the 2024 Salzburg Mozartwoche and the continued power of inherited canonical narratives today.
Beethoven’s Bust and Phrenology from 1812 to the Present
Hester Bell Jordan
Independent
Franz Klein’s ca. 1812 bust of Beethoven and the life mask on which it was modeled are among Western music iconography’s most famous objects (Comini 2000, Fine 2020). Though commonly viewed as the composer’s “truest representation,” the genesis of Klein’s Beethoven bust is yet to be fully explored (Steblin 1993). Scrutiny is especially needed regarding its connection to phrenology, the nascent theory of human behavior and brain function based on the shape of the skull. The bust was commissioned by piano maker Nannette Streicher-Stein and her husband for their new concert room, and both patrons and artist had close ties to phrenology’s inventor Franz Josef Gall: the Streichers were dedicated followers and close friends of Gall, while Klein spent his formative years making anatomical models of heads for the scientist (Krasa-Florian 1970). Phrenology adherents like the Streichers believed that a person’s innate characteristics and tendencies could be identified by examining their head, skull, or a plaster model, and that musical talent was indicated by a wide, “noble brow” like that observable on the Beethoven bust (Wyhe 2002, Kimber 2012).
This paper argues that Beethoven’s bust was conceived as a phrenological object and interpreted as such well beyond the Streicher concert room. I consider how such busts provided opportunities for amateur head readings, cultivation of self-knowledge, and negotiation of new “scientific,” brain-based notions of musical genius (Eling et al 2015, Bittel 2023). More broadly, I reflect on how this long-discredited doctrine haunts our understanding of Beethoven today. In music as in other fields, phrenology served as a bridge from the eighteenth century’s semi-spiritual theory of physiognomy to the nineteenth’s scientific theories of evolution and, eventually, its popular reinterpretations in Social Darwinism, eugenics, biological racism, and white supremacy (Richards 2013, Celenza 2010, Cowan 2023). Ongoing fascination with Beethoven’s appearance, ethnicity, genetics, and skeletal remains in the twenty-first century suggests that discredited phrenological ideas about race, gender, and intellect circulate covertly alongside newer modes of thought (Meredith 2005/2015, Begg 2023, Thurman 2023). Despite its designation as pseudoscientific, phrenology thus remains highly relevant to contemporary discourse on Beethoven and his likeness.
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